This Lady Lives Upstairs And The Man Won’t Stop Being Weird About It (The Seven Year Itch) — As Explained By A 5-Year-Old Who Saw It On Accident
Some movies are about love. Some are about danger. Some are about a man who cannot calm down for two whole hours. A five-year-old from outside Memphis has thoughts.
NARRATOR ID CARD
Name: Junebug Maylene Tate
Age: 5 (and a half, she will tell you) Gender: Girl
Location: Millington, Tennessee (just past the Piggly Wiggly, she says, like that helps)
The Movie (As Told By Me)
Okay so. Okay. There’s this man and his wife goes away on a trip with their little boy and the man stays home by hisself which already I don’t think that’s a good idea because my daddy can’t even find the cereal when mama’s gone and one time he put my shoes in the refrigerator so I don’t trust men home alone, I’m sorry, I just don’t.
The man’s name is Richard but I been calling him Nervous Man the whole time because he IS. He’s real nervous. Like how Tyler gets before a spelling test except worse and for longer.
So the lady upstairs moves in. She is SO pretty. She has this white dress and real nice hair and everybody’s looking at her all the time and she doesn’t even notice which I think is because she’s thinking about something important, probably snacks or where she put her keys, I don’t know, grown-up stuff.
[my dog just barked at the door — okay he stopped]
The Nervous Man sees her and his brain goes completely haywire. Like completely. He starts talking to himself in his apartment and making up whole conversations that didn’t happen and I was like, Sir. SIR. You need to go to bed. That’s what happens when I don’t sleep enough, I start talking crazy, and my mama makes me lay down with no TV and I feel better. Someone shoulda done that for him. Just. Lay down, Nervous Man.
He invites the pretty lady — I call her Miss Upstairs because I forgot her actual name or maybe she didn’t have one, I think she didn’t — he invites her down for a drink. And she COMES. She just comes right in! And I was like, Miss Upstairs, you don’t know him!! My teacher Mrs. Fontenot says you don’t go in stranger’s houses and this lady just walked right in like she lived there, which she didn’t, she lived UPSTAIRS, that’s the whole thing.
And okay here’s the part that’s famous. I know it’s famous because my Nana had a picture of it on a — I don’t know what you call it, like a flat calendar thing — and the pretty lady is standing over this thing in the sidewalk and her dress goes whoooooosh up and she’s laughing. And the Nervous Man is just standing there like he forgot how his face works.
Is that real? Like can sidewalks actually do that? Because one time me and Deja were running and there was a big grate thing and it blew hot air and it smelled like the inside of the dryer and I jumped over it because I’m smart. Miss Upstairs didn’t jump. She just stood there. Which honestly I think was her plan.
The dress part is my favorite part. The swoooosh.
The Nervous Man keeps imagining things that aren’t happening. Like he’ll be sitting there and then suddenly he’s imagining he’s very romantic and everyone thinks he’s great, and then it cuts back and he’s just sitting there looking confused at a tomato juice. That’s actually pretty much the whole movie. Him imagining stuff and then not. It goes like that for a while.
Oh! And he has a book. He works with books I think? He makes books? Or he sells them? One of those. The book is about something called the seven year itch which my mama said means when you been married seven years you start acting foolish. And I said what does itch mean and she said never mind Junebug. So I still don’t know.
— wait I do know what itch means, I’m not a baby, I meant what does it mean in that way.
Okay but the Nervous Man feels real bad because he has a wife, right, she’s on vacation, and he keeps almost doing something dumb and then not doing it, and then almost again, and then not. It’s like watching someone try to jump off the diving board for the first time. You ever seen that? At the city pool? They just stand there and stand there and everyone’s waiting and then they DON’T. The Nervous Man is like that but the whole entire movie is the diving board.
The pretty lady is really nice actually. She’s not trying to cause trouble I don’t think. I think she’s just hot because this was summer and her apartment probably didn’t have good AC. We got window units and they’re loud but they work. Miss Upstairs didn’t seem like she had a window unit. That’s probably why she kept coming downstairs. The cold air. Yeah. That’s it.
[I want goldfish crackers but mama said the kitchen’s closed]
The Nervous Man calls his wife on the phone one time. He’s real guilty-sounding even though he didn’t even DO anything which — okay honestly, I do that too. Like if I’m thinking about eating the cookies but I haven’t yet and mama looks at me I act all guilty and she knows. She always knows. That’s just how it goes.
Oh. Okay. One part. There’s a piano part. The Nervous Man plays piano — wait, no. No he doesn’t. Miss Upstairs plays piano. Or someone does. Or maybe it was just music that was playing. Hmm. I’m pretty sure there was a piano. There was definitely music. The music was very fancy and went dun dun DUUUN a lot.
I know the piano was dark brown because I remember looking at it. I really liked that piano actually. I was waiting for it to come back. It didn’t really come back. I kept watching the corner of the room where it was. That happens a lot in movies, they show you something cool and then they just forget about it.
Why you makin that face? I’m getting to the end part.
So the Nervous Man decides he’s gotta go to his wife. He feels bad. He goes and he’s in a hurry and I think he leaves some of his stuff at the apartment which, okay, I would’ve made a list, but he’s a grown man so. He goes to find his family because he loves them and his brain was just acting weird from the heat and loneliness and not sleeping probably. That’s my theory. I know because my teacher said the brain does funny things when you’re very tired but she said I wasn’t supposed to repeat that, it was for the big kids.
And Miss Upstairs I think she goes back upstairs. Or maybe she went on vacation too. I think she was fine. She seemed fine. She was the finest one in the movie honestly.
I was a little sad at the end but not really crying sad. More like that thing where a song ends and you wanted it to keep going. A little like that.
Favorite Part
The dress going WHOOOOSH. Also every time the Nervous Man started imagining things and I could tell because his face would do this thing. And also there was one part where he fell down or almost fell down, I’m not sure, but I liked it.
Kid Rating
Fun: 🌟🌟🌟 (three stars, it’s mostly talking but the talking is fast and funny) Scariness: 🌟 (one star, the Nervous Man is scary but only to himself) Cool Stuff: 🌟🌟 (the dress, the city, a fan, probably the piano that left too soon) Sounds: 🌟🌟🌟 (the music is real good and dramatic) Colors: 🌟🌟🌟🌟 (okay it’s black and white but Miss Upstairs’ dress is so white it counts as a color, I’ve decided)
Kid Moral
If your brain keeps making stuff up, you should probably just go be with your family and drink some water and lay down. Also if someone upstairs keeps dropping things you should just introduce yourself right away at the beginning so you don’t go crazy about it.
Actual Plot In One Sentence
A married man whose wife and kid leave for summer vacation spends the whole time being extremely nervous about the pretty lady who moved upstairs while mostly nothing happens and then he decides to go find his family.
Cinephile Wink
Billy Wilder built the entire film on what doesn’t happen — the transgression exists entirely in implication and in Richard Sherman’s overheated imagination. It’s a comedy of anticipation, not action. The joke is that the audience projects just as much as he does. Marilyn Monroe’s performance is warmer and more knowing than it’s often credited; she’s not naive, she’s just unbothered in a way that makes his panic funnier.
Somewhere between the second act and your third attempt to explain the title to a kindergartner, this film reminds you that a great comedy requires exactly one man losing his mind with great dignity and exactly one woman who didn’t agree to be part of any of this. Junebug Tate remains convinced the piano did something important. She is not entirely wrong.
No children were subjected to Billy Wilder films in the making of this piece — though one imagines they might understand him better than we think. Junebug Maylene Tate is a creature of pure invention, assembled from the raw materials of childhood: misplaced certainty, genuine feeling, and a very strong opinion about window units. The imagination of a child does not simplify a story so much as it strips it to the bone — and sometimes the bone is funnier than the whole animal. What remains when you remove sophistication, irony, and context is, occasionally, something true. Or at least something about a piano. — The Cine Sage
